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300-word High Proficiency Kernel Concept | ||
Tags: Number of words | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4854 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes  Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 9 of 80 28 September 2014 at 12:26am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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It'll be tough to keep up with s_allard if he makes this argument every day on the forum. Eventually everyone will
get tired of pointing out the numerous caveats. Not everything about it is wrong, but stated this way it is misleading, ignores comprehension, and is in my opinion too strong a claim. On the other thread, "How many words to speak?" we debated it down to a more reasonable middle ground.
Some of the above posters are acting as if s_allard is suggesting the 300-word kernel, alone, is enough. He is suggesting a 300-word kernel is essential for all topics, plus additional topic- specific words. For a placement test, you can steer the conversation to a few topics you've prepared, and thus get by with the kernel plus a reasonably sized topic-specific supplement. Obviously, to be an actual C2 level speaker who, by definition, can handle all sorts of different topics, the topic-specific group has to be quite large. Nevertheless, there may be a small kernel that cuts across all topics. This claim could be investigated with some data or a concrete demonstration.
To understand at an A1 level you need more than 300 words. However, you could certainly be an A1 level speaker if you are only comfortable using a 300-word kernel actively. As for C2, of course not. The claim is that C1-C2 can be reached 300-word kernel, plus some topic-specific words, the number of which depends on the range of topics, not the level of advancedness. As for whether this is a practical method for learning, I'll reiterate the point that mastery of the usage of the kernel depends on lots of exposure to how they are used. This in turn requires input, which naturally increases your vocabulary. Vocabulary may or may not be a limiting factor, but it naturally comes along with mastery. Is it useful, then, to intensively study the usage of a 300-word kernel? Perhaps it would help your speaking a lot to study common collocations and usages of such high-value words. This would work even better if you have at least passive familiarity with the thousands of other words that are used along with the kernel. In fact if your comprehension is good but usage is shaky while speaking, it seems a reasonable method to study collocations and structures using the really common words. For any learner interested in reading or listening comprehension rather than pure conversational speech, this is not going to be a complete approach. Edited by robarb on 28 September 2014 at 1:10am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3842 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 10 of 80 28 September 2014 at 1:52am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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300 words are more or less all the words with a grammatical function, plus the numbers, the days of the week, the
months of the year, the seasons and the colours. You may be not able even to talk about the weather with only 300 words. Said that, I find impossible to know how many words you know (at different degrees of mastery). As an Italian speaker I understand perfectly the word 'idiosyncrasy' but I never remember what a 'hawk' is. I don't know many of the English names for the objects that I have in the kitchen but I guesstimate my vocabulary to be around 5000 words. At C2 level you should be able to write essays about very specific philosophical and socio-economic topics, thus I think you need a vocabulary of 20.000 words. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4704 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 11 of 80 28 September 2014 at 10:33am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I just signed up for a Korean safe-cracking course. My worry was that I would have to learn Korean numbers, but my course instructor was reassuring. He said that all of the safes we would be cracking have only four numbers in the combination. The good news is I only need to learn four numbers!
8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6377 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 80 28 September 2014 at 11:06am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
If you really want to find out, you can get a paper dictionary, look up a random page and count the number of words you understand. Divide this be the number of total words on the page. Then multiply with the total number of words in the dictionary. The more pages you do, the more accurate your test. Edited by Ari on 28 September 2014 at 11:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4144 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 13 of 80 28 September 2014 at 3:36pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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@Ari It seems to me; the problem with estimating the typical vocabulary of a speaker at a certain
level, might not lie as much in approximating their lexicon, as in their level. It's easy to distinguish an A2 speaker from a C2 one, but when exactly does one go from C1 to C2? It's hard to pinpoint just one point - can one word, grammatical rule or idiom make the difference? It seems so fluid to me, that there might be some overlap between consecutive levels. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5225 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 14 of 80 28 September 2014 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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This took much longer than I thought but it was well worth the effort. I have to thank robarb for trying to clarify
some of the issues here, as it is clearly evident that some people go bonkers immediately when they see the figure 300 and my name. But on with the show. In my search for a speaking genre that would approximate the C-level speaking test in Spanish, I stumbled upon (in Spanish dar de bruces for those who may be interested), the TEDxtalks on Youtube. These are a series of annual conferences where speakers talk about all kinds of topics. Each talk is about 16 - 18 minutes. There are no questions and answers in the recordings. Since the conferences are held all over the Spanish-speaking world, there is a great representation of different varieties of Spanish. I chose these talks as somewhat comparable to a C-level speaking test because the subjects are quite specific without being too technical. Things that a generally cultivated audience can follow. This is spoken Spanish for presentations. It's not exactly conversational, and it's certainly not slang. Exactly the sort of thing I'm interested in. Although the subjects are very varied, my impression is that these TED talks are heavy on motivational and feel- good stories. I should also add that many of the videos even have subtitles in English. You can't get better than this for learning Spanish. As I pointed out in the OP, and as robard has nicely summarized, my goal was to create a learning tool for acquiring, consolidating and maintaining speaking proficiency at this level. The fundamental idea is to define a small kernel of words that will form the basis for developing speaking strategies when having to deal with a variety of subjects. The basic method consisted of carefully looking at around 15 videos - I'm looking at new ones all the time - and trying to determine which words and what I call grammatical micro-structures are widely used across the various videos. There's a nuance here. The question isn't what words are most common. It's what words are most widely spread over all the videos. This kernel is a sort of foundation for high-level speaking proficiency. If this idea works, it would make sense to study this kernel intensively and at the same time use other techniques to acquire more vocabulary and grammatical mastery. After spending quite a bit of time on this first attempt, I have a couple of observations: 1. There are major issues with defining words, and above all, in how to classify them into grammatical categories. Should a word be counted three times because it can be a noun, a pronoun and an adverb? Here I've simply counted a word form once. Keep in mind that verbs can act as nouns. Adjectives can easily be transformed into adverbs. 2. At this level of speaking, idioms and set phrases are very common. I've not counted them separately. 3. Although I've whittled things down to around 300 words, I really think that 400 or even 350 would have been a better number. At those levels there is more room for things that are quite common and useful. 4. Not unexpectedly, the most problematic area was the nouns where that was a lot of content-specific vocabulary. My words I include here are things of a very general nature. A first version of a 300-word high-proficiency Spanish kernel This is very much a work in progress. I find that I'm continuously refining it as I work with it. Therefore, the numbers may be slightly off. The breakdown by functional category is as follows. Verbs: 110 Nouns: 84 Adjectives: 53 Adverbs 12 Pronouns: 10 Connecting words: 32 Total: 310
Defining the adverbs was the most difficult task
Connecting words is a bit of a catch-all category that is somewhat murky.
Edit: The following correction was made: Adjectives can easily be transformed into adverbs, Edited by s_allard on 29 September 2014 at 3:56am 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5225 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 15 of 80 28 September 2014 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Conclusions and afterthoughts
This will be probably considered a bit self-serving but I am extremely pleased with the results. That said, there are a couple of caveats. Here are my main afterthoughts. 1. I believe that a list like this really contains the most common building blocks for producing the speeches of the genre TEDxTalks in Spanish. Every single speech contains a large number of the words here supplemented with content-specific vocabulary. 2. This makes an excellent guide to what a proficient speaker has to master. It should, of course, be customized for each user. 3. The biggest problem with this kind of list is that it is a gross oversimplification of the complexities of actual use of these words. What we have here is just the tip of the iceberg. I hope nobody believes that these 300 words are all you need to know to speak Spanish at the C level. 4. This list is too small. Something in the 350-400-word range would probably be more useful. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7000 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 16 of 80 29 September 2014 at 12:21am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Bueno, pero, con esas palabras no se puede entender las palabras "bueno", ni "pero", ni "palabras", ni "no", ni "entender" ni "ni". Edited by luke on 29 September 2014 at 12:30am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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